Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History: Addendum: EP34 Atomic Accountability.
Dan visits with Professor Alex Wellerstein, whose new book about Truman and the dropping of the atomic bombs will challenge everything you think you know about the subject.
Re Alex Wellerstein, The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age (2025).
Summary of Hardcore History Addendum: Interview with Alex Wellerstein (Grok)
(Book: The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age)
Paragraph 1 – Introduction and Why This Book Matters
Dan Carlin opens by explaining why he keeps returning to nuclear weapons and the end of World War II: these are the most consequential events in human history, and we still do not think about them nearly enough. He describes Alex Wellerstein’s new book as one of those rare works that completely upends long-held assumptions about a topic most listeners already feel they know well. After decades of reading about the atomic bombings, Carlin says the book forced him to rethink everything, comparable to how Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction rewrote his understanding of Nazi Germany. Wellerstein, a historian of nuclear weapons, stumbled onto explosive new evidence while searching for the original orders to drop the bombs.
Paragraph 2 – The Core Revelation: Truman Did Not Know He Was Bombing Cities Full of Civilians
The book’s central, shocking claim is that Harry Truman appears to have genuinely misunderstood what he was authorizing. He believed he was approving attacks on purely military targets and repeatedly stated (publicly and privately) that the atomic bomb should never be used on women and children. Evidence from Truman’s own diary, Stimson’s diary, and contemporaneous notes strongly suggests that when Truman agreed to remove Kyoto from the target list (to avoid destroying a cultural/historic city), he thought the discussion was “military base vs. city” and came away believing Hiroshima was the former. In reality, Hiroshima was very much a city, and Truman only realized this after seeing the first post-attack photographs and casualty reports on August 8, 1945.
Paragraph 3 – How the Misunderstanding Happened: Bureaucratic Chaos and Wartime Momentum
The decision to use the bombs was never formally debated at the highest level the way popular history assumes. Plans were already rolling under an “assembly-line” approach driven by General Leslie Groves and the Target Committee long before Truman became president. FDR’s sudden death left Truman almost completely uninformed about the Manhattan Project; he was briefed in rushed, superficial meetings (sometimes 25 minutes to cover the entire history and science of the bomb). The Kyoto discussion with Secretary of War Henry Stimson became the only real input Truman gave on targeting, and a plausible miscommunication in that single conversation led him to believe he had ensured the first bomb would hit a military installation, not a city center.
Paragraph 4 – Truman’s Reaction and Immediate Aftermath
By August 8 (the day before Nagasaki), Truman knew Hiroshima had been a city and was deeply disturbed (headaches, sleeplessness, visibly shaken in photos). There is no evidence he was told a second bomb was already on its way to Nagasaki; the strike order had allowed further bombs to be dropped as soon of as bombs became available. On August podjet 10, Truman abruptly halted further atomic attacks, telling his cabinet he could not bear “killing all those kids.” From that moment he seized personal control of any future use, determined that no president (and especially no “dashing lieutenant colonel”) should ever again be able to launch nuclear weapons without explicit White House approval, effectively inventing exclusive presidential nuclear authority, not to enable use, but to prevent it.
Paragraph 5 – Truman’s Longer-Term Legacy and the Birth of the Nuclear Taboo
Far from the cold warrior caricature, Truman until roughly 1950 was remarkably conciliatory toward the Soviet Union and repeatedly expressed hope that nuclear weapons could be banned entirely. He saw the atomic bomb as uniquely immoral, worse even than chemical or biological weapons, and spent the rest of his presidency trying to ensure they would never be used again. Wellerstein and Carlin agree that Truman’s personal revulsion and his decision to centralize launch authority in the presidency (rather than the military) played a major role in creating the ma97 classifying
СМИ the nuclear taboo-weapontaboo. Paradoxically, the only president who ever ordered nuclear weapons used in war may be one of the main reasons they have not been used since. The book ends with a sobering 2025 reminder: nuclear outcomes still hinge on the judgment, understanding, and moral compass of individual leaders far more than we like to admit.
